Movie Nation

An actress and her daughter have an amusing interaction upon reuniting in this French dramedy.
Ethan Hawke is also in the cast of this March 20 US release. https://youtu.be/LoNoOn6c0gA

Here’s one that should have come off, but doesn’t.

“Holy Expectations” or “Embarazada por obra y gracia” is a faith-based musical farce from Colombia that comically re-imagines the Nativity story in modern day Colombia.

It’s got sherbet-colored houses and Panama hats, hapless “wise men” and a Herod as a Bond villain. The script uses a “Wizard of Oz” structure, a sickly child (Isabella Sierra) is told the story of the birth of baby Jesus, imagining her doctor (Adriana Botina) as Mary, her pastor (Fernando Ramos) as Joseph, a soap opera star (José Manuel Ospina) as a playful, magical archangel Gabriel and three goofball orderlies as the “Three Kings” sent in search of the barn — because there’s no room at the clinic — where Christ is to be born.

Shepherds, as singing cowboys, serenade the family. But everybody sings, especially Gabriel — “In her belly, sitting tightly, is the son of the Almighty!” (in Spanish, with English subtitles).

But from the opening framing devise, little Gabriella dragging widowed dad (Joavany Alvarez) to church so she can perform with the “praise (singing) group,” fainting and then hospitalized, “Holy Expectations” dashes expectations.

Dad tells her the story, pre-surgery in the hospital, embellishing it with Colombian touches — the style of music, Joseph driving Mary in an aged Jeep to Belén, the disreputable and quarrelsome “kings” (Omar Murillo, Christian López, Nelson Purillo) bickering and mugging and piling into orange VW Beetle — foiled at every turn, because Herodine (Aida Morales) wants them to kill the baby before it can start trouble.

The songs are cute, but the performances — heavy on the jamón — cannot make the many light touches actually funny. Mary and Joseph come off well, but the kings don’t dive deep enough into slapstick to ever live up to their promise.

The only moments I laughed were when the shepherds showed up.

MPAA Rating: TV-PG

Cast:  Adriana Botina, Fernando Ramos, Isabella Sierra, Joavany Alvarez, Omar Murillo, Christian López, Nelson Purillo, Aida Morales and José Manuel Ospina

Credits: Directed by  Fernando Ayllón, script by  Fernando Ayllón, Ángel Ayllón. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:29

It’s an odd niche, I’ll admit. But I’ve always been fascinated by the origin stories of professions.

The art of criminal investigation unfolding in “The Name of the Rose,” Medieval legal defense arising in “The Advocate,” medicine moving out of Dark Ages superstition in “The Physician” — all were absorbing period pieces with whose antagonists are, in various ways, poking around in the dark or making it up as they go along.

In “Three Christs,” group therapy was a new thing when an academic decided to try it out of three schizophrenic men whose delusions had them thinking they were Jesus at the Ypsilanti, Michigan mental hospital where they were housed.

But electro-shock therapy and drugs were getting them nowhere. And Dr. Alan Stone (Richard Gere) thinks a little empathy, from him and them to each other, might help. He is drawn to schizophrenia because of the overriding characteristic of those suffering from this illness — “because they’re so lonely.”

Director and co-writer Jon Avnet (“Fried Green Tomatoes,” “Red Corner”) conjures up a too-conventional treatment of this true story, one that devolves from quiet character study into full-blown, over-the-top “star vehicle” in its last act.

But very good casting, and committed work from the “Christs” in question — Peter Dinklage, Walton Goggins and Bradley Whitford — make this drama just uplifting enough to come off.

It’s a heavily-fictionalized version of the case-study “The Three Christs of Ypsilanti by Milton Rokeach. Gere plays a version of the psychotherapist, who takes a job at a state hospital to do some research and publish. As he’s already published criticisms of such institutions as “warehouses” or “bureaucratic, unfeeling conformity.”

The director of the place (Kevin Pollack) is not amused. The state director (Stephen Root) is willing to give Stone a little latitude.

Because Stone has stumbled into the fact that there are “three Cinderellas, two Eisenhowers (it’s 1960) and one Duke Ellington” among their 4100 patients. And the three fellows who think they’re Jesus have his attention.

Joseph (Dinklage) is “Jesus Christ, courageous one am I,” an opera buff who affects an English accent.

Clyde (Whitford) is “Christ, but I’m not from Nazareth.” He’s constantly singing TV commercial jingles, constantly showering, incessantly complaining about a stench only he smells.

Leon (Goggins) is the belligerent, scary one. “Address me by my RIGHTEOUS name, God!” He is oversexed and cannot stop talking about Dr. Stone’s new assistant, Becky (Charlotte Hope).

Stone figures he can “put the three of them in a room,” get them singing, talking and playing cards,” which might help them “give up their delusions.”

Is he delusional? Every time the lights dim in the place, “Shocky Boy,” a trigger happy therapist “managing” the unruly, has electro-shocked another victim.

The conventional touches — and there are many — are the problems his obsession creates for Dr. Stone at home (Julianna Margulies plays his chemist-wife), the tug of war over the patients with Dr. Orbus (Pollack) and the shortcuts that Stone takes to try and “speed up” the process.

It being 1960, dabbling in LSD-driven self-awareness is on the table.

And “progress” is measured in civility, calms of sanity, sort of “Awakenings” with schizophrenia.

The big boss, the one who scares EVERYbody, is played by four-time Oscar nominee Jane Alexander.

Avnet never lets the picture lapse into “cute,” but there are moments, here and there, that seem off-key or gratuitous. And the third act’s heroics are so formulaic and old fashioned that you’d think they’d been banished by the ridicule they took in Robert Altman’s movie biz satire “The Player” 25 years ago.

But this cast never lets us feel that the story isn’t in the hands of seasoned pros, that what we understand and feel out of this story isn’t earned, even if it is often expected.

MPAA Rating: R for disturbing material, sexual content and brief drug use

Cast: Richard Gere, Peter Dinklage, Julianna Margulies, Charlotte Hope, Walton Goggins, Bradley Whitford, Kevin Pollack and Jane Alexander

Credits: Directed by Jon Avnet, script by Eric Nazarian and Jon Avnet, based on the book “The Three Christs of Ypsilanti by Milton Rokeach. An IFC release.

Running time: 1:50

Sometimes, it’s the cover-up, not the crime, the old political saying goes.

But sometimes, it’s the crime AND the cover-up.

That’s the thesis of “The Photographer of Mauthausen” (“El fotógrafo de Mauthausen”), a Catalan/Spanish story from the Holocaust. Because mass extermination of Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, homosexuals and others can be easily proven. Proving who did it requires eyewitnesses and hard evidence.

Francesc Boix (Mario Casas of “The 33” and “Witching & Bitching”) was one of several thousand Spanish exiles, refugees from the country’s bloody civil war, captured by the Germans when they overran France in 1940. Declared stateless by their fascist government, the Germans were free to make them among the first sent to concentration camps.

“We BUILT it,” Boix declares (in Spanish with English subtitles) in the voice-over narration, “it” being the Mauthausen camp in Austria. When we meet him, he is already a photographer, working for the camp officer (Richard van Weyden) in charge of photography, part of the meticulous record-keeping the Germans are famous for.

In the early days of the camp, they went to the trouble of sending condolence letters to the families of those murdered there, which is a bit of shock. But again, it was early in the war, mass extermination wasn’t necessarily on the horizon, and perhaps things were more Geneva Conventional in Austria at the time.

Boix and others, mostly his fellow communists, organized into “night and fog” resistance — altering the serial numbers on murdered prisoners’ in their photos, messing with that Nazi bookkeeping.

Boix is a trusty, and lies to a newly-arrived little boy (Adrià Salazar) who has been separated from his father, “to give him hope.” In a grim world of labor, privation and random, summary executions, it’s all any of them have to give.

Boix is dragged out to prisoner massacres in the forests, to document the deed, while his twisted boss, Ricken (van Weyden), concerns himself with the odd-looking; dwarves, one-legged prisoners, etc.

Stumbling across negatives in the dark room, Boix notices that the bookkeepers are keeping everything. Listening in to the camp radio his fellow inmates have conjured up, he hears the tide of the war turning in the East. What will their monstrous, murderous and “victorious” captors do when they realize the war is lost?

Saving that film becomes a mission.

Director Mar Taragona, better known a producer of Spanish films (“The Orphanage”), and the script immerse us in the nuts and bolts of mass extermination — an early model of the vans used to gas victims is assessed. And the boilerplate characters and ingredients of concentration camp/POW camp movies can’t help but make appearances.

The sadism and utter disregard for life, especially by the SS kommandant (Stefan Weinert, properly monstrous), the plucky inmates figuring out ways to fool “the very best people” put in charge of such camps, the ingenious “systems” devised for hiding contraband or planning escapes. There’s even an amusing Spanish stage revue they put on to cover an escape attempt (the Germans don’t realize the Spaniards are singing about Russians and Americans on their way to liberate them).

“The Photographer” reminds us how hard it is to say something new on this subject, to avoid third act melodrama, even when the tale is essentially true. A lot of luck and chance were involved in deciding who lived and who died.

More attention should probably have been paid the photographs, stark images of murder, victims lying on snow, dangling from fences, etc. Several scenes take on a far-fetched air, a dubious dinner party interrupted by teaching a child how to shoot his first “sub human.”

But “The Photographer of Mauthausen” does boast of a novel demographic — Spanish victims, communists — and Casas makes a sturdy lead, playing not just someone who endured a camp, not just someone who could bear witness, but a man who made saving the photographic evidence something he was willing to die for.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence, sexual situation, nudity

Cast: Mario Casas, Richard van Weyden, Alain Hernández, Adrià Salazar and Stefan Weinert

Credits: Directed by Mar Taragona, script by Roger Danès, Alfred Pérez Fargas. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:50

Snowboarding ventures into the realm of the rich and giant-carbon-footprint classes with “Dark Matter,” a lovely “virgin powder” downhill documentary shot in the pristine peaks near Tordrillo Heli (helicopter) Skiing lodge way up north in Alaska.

Snowboarding icons Travis Rice and Elias Elhardt are captured riding down slopes so steep you’d need crampons just to cling to them, sitting still. Filmed via helmet cams and from the helicopter that dropped them (GIANT carbon footprint), in slo-mo and with the odd kaleidoscopic post-production effects by director Curt Morgan, we see snowboarding at its most graceful.

The guys seek ridgelines so narrow they’re like the stairway railings skateboarders shred, perform acrobatic jumps and spins off some mini-cliffs, and finish with such deep thoughts as “That is a thing of sheer beauty” and “I can’t believe we just rode that.”

The only clue to the film’s location is seeing them put up at the Tordrillo Lodge. There’s a bit of pretentious narration, but no geographic graphics ID’ing the range or the guys or what have you.

Just “We assign a meaning to everything we to everything we see…chaos, or harmony” intoned in voice-over.

It’s pretty to look at. Is it a movie? No, it is not.

Cast: Travis Rice, Elias Elhardt

Credits: Directed by Curt Morgan. A 1091 release.

Running time: :27

Here’s an unsophisticated, ribald and trigger-happy “Knives Out” for those who like their whodunits with a tad more spice, bloodshed and profanity.

“Kill Ben Lyk” is a daft and dizzy Brit farce about a lot of people with the same oddly-spelled name who are knocked-off by some unknown assailant. That happens both before the cops are wise to the scheme, and after, despite the coppers rounding up the last Ben Lyks in London and (allegedly) protecting them in a safe house until they can figure out who is doing the killing, and why.

It’s the sort of comedy where the first murder happens in delicto flagrante, a Ben Lyk in a knight’s armor costume, ravishing an eager palace wench, shot at without effect until finally a hit is scored.

It’s also the sort of comedy where the pistol’s “silencer” is forgotten, at least in the opening scene. The shots are at full volume, because in the UK, they’re not as gun nutty or gun savvy as we are on this side of the pond.

Our protagonist is a Ben Lyk (Eugene Simon) with a vlog, which he compulsively feeds with his delusional video selfies and updates about how popular, charismatic and attractive to the ladies he must be.

These vlog entries inevitably end with Ben getting punched.

“It’s a niche,” he admits to his skeptical stoner pal Roberto (Dimitri Leonidas). “Might hurt a bit. But you’ve got to admit, it’s working!”

Maybe. Then he starts reading of other Ben Lyks in Greater London getting offed, and Our Ben starts to freak out. “Please don’t kill me,” he pleads in one vlog entry. Pay no attention to the mate in the corner of the frame. “Don’t worry about him. He’s stoned.”

After conferring with another Ben Lyk via Skype as the bloke is blown away, the cops come to take Our Ben into protective custody.

“Less chatting, more packing” the detective (Gretchen Egolf) and her crew demand.

Naturally, Ben finds himself in a safe house with seven other Ben Lyks, including a rugby-playing vicar (Charlie Raws), a banker, a generic punk and…a woman. Maybe. There’s some discussion of her (Simone Ashley of “Detective Pikachu”) Adam’s apple and accurate gender ID.

The ladies’ man Ben (Ashley Thomas) is instantly suspected. “Why are you all looking at me? Is it because I’m BLACK?”

The female Ben keeps coming on to the hapless vlogger Ben, only to shoot him down (not literally).

“I haven’t felt this way since I saw ‘Mulan!'”

And then there’s the REAL mastermind, the sort of villain who orders “When I say ‘Kill ALL the Ben Lyks,’ I mean kill ALL!”

The mystery isn’t all that mysterious, but the brisk pacing and banter atone for any real sins this shoot-em-in-the-temple comedy stumbles into.

A detective distracted by constant calls from her little boy at home, all those in her protection left on their own, accusing and shooting or shooting at each other, willy nilly, the real killer giving orders behind the scenes, and an alarming body count add up to a pretty funny triggerman farce.

Pretty funny, like our leading man, who rarely got to cut up as Lancel Lannister on “Game of Thrones” or playing the young Judah Ben-Hur in the recent remake.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, sex

Cast: Eugene Simon, Simone Ashley, Ashley Thomas, Dimitri Leonidas, Charlie Rawes and Gretchen Egolf.

Credits. Directed by Erwan Marinopoulos, script by Jean-Christophe Establet, Oliver Maltman, and Erwan Marinopolous

An Artists Rights release.

Running time: 1:20

Do you know the horror film “Blue Harvest?” Ever heard of it? No?

That’s because it doesn’t exist. It was the cover-name for a short duration film shoot in the desert Southwest way back in the early ’80s. It came with ID badges, production tchotchkes, the works — an elaborate ruse. Because God forbid the locals figure out a “Star Wars” sequel was doing location filming in their midst.

Anthony Daniels has been there, from the beginning, a lone actor wrapped in claustrophobic, myopic, suffocating metal/plastic and gold tape “suit,” a prissy fussbudget “English butler” lost in space, enveloped in “The Star Wars.”

He suffered for his art — injuries, daily cuts, nicks and scratches, about one serious panic attack (you try being locked into something you can’t escape from on your own, inhibiting your breathing, shoved onto sets where you have no sight lines and even a set of stairs offer great peril) every other film.

He endured this, and a thousand other injuries and insults, grievous to petty, many of which he recounts in “I Am C3PO,” a light and generally charming memoir that also — let’s be blunt, Tony — settles a few scores.

They tried to pretend there was nobody “inside the suit,” at first. Keep the illusion that Fox had come up with great android tech for this 1977 sci-fi serial (C-movie) alive.

Lucas tried to re-cast the voice actor performing C3PO, seemed put out by everything and all the work-arounds encasing an actor in a walking sarcophagus entailed. Refused to run lines when the actor playing the part needed to be reacting to someone or something (R2D2) that wasn’t there, or wasn’t responsive.

George also tried to recast Frank Oz’s voice as Yoda, without telling Frank, and dubbed Ray Park as Darth Maul without ever telling him (Daniels broke the news to Park lest he be humiliated at the premiere). Lucas was so impatient with “actors” that he developed “We’ll add him in post” production digital ethos during the much-maligned prequels.

George doesn’t relate that well to people. “On the spectrum?” Maybe.

Daniels confines himself in “C3PO” to his “Star Wars” work, so there’s little of what one could call his personal life here. But being hauled out to awards shows, awards banquets and the like, meant a thousand slights — and not just for him — from the start. He, his fellow masked actors and Oscar winning effects colleagues faced that, in stories he tells, early on.

He had a falling out with Kenny Baker, the little person who sometimes inhabited the R2 trash can. Baker wanted to do paid public appearance tours as a duo, and Daniels found it beneath him. Harrison Ford’s relationship with him came close to Han Solo’s brusque treatment of C3PO (Just in character?).

Mark Hamill? An onset chum for decades, both of them charmed and endlessly amused by Carrie Fisher.

Director Richard Marquand (“Return of the Jedi”) was the rudest and most dismissive filmmaker he dealt with in the series, Irving Kirshner (“Empire Strikes Back”) the most supportive, constructive and fun.

He repeats as assertion he made the last time I spoke with him, when he was touring with a “Star Wars” orchestral experience, “Star Wars: In Concert.” He presented the music of John Williams as clips from the films played in the background, and it was “the best job I ever had.” If you saw it, it was thrilling and fun.

Daniels was there at the birth of the “Stars Wars: Celebration” fan conventions, a planner and organizer and the MC for the first one, a near debacle in Denver which gave birth to perhaps the second biggest fan con of all.

There’s a telling J.J. Abrams forward to the book in which one can see he was probably too close to the films, as a young fan, to wholly do them justice, stretch them out and push back against corporate/marketing-driven decisions about the last trilogy.

But mostly this is just Daniels, explaining how it was done, boo-boos covered up (or not), the harrowing nature of working on sets where OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) supervision did not apply, and doing it all in that clipped, prissy and utterly delightful voice of a digital expert in “human-cyborg relations.”

His opinions of the films themselves are either blunt or oblique. He knew which ones were off the rails by the constant script rewrites, wrong-headedness, over-reliance on CGI, etc. Knew it before the camera rolled.

We’re reminded, without him having to say so himself, that Daniels truly was the glue that held “Star Wars” together in this breezy, fun read.

Honorary Oscar? Someday. Perhaps.

“I Am C3PO: The Inside Story.” DK Books/Penguin Random House. 271 pages. $24.99

This was probably reason enough to take on “Cats.”

Jennifer Hudson made this Aretha Franklin biopic for MGM, but overseas it will be distributed by Universal. Universal is distributing “Cats.”

The “Respect” trailer is running in front of “Cats.” This is “quid pro quo” defined, for those confused by a little Latin.

This is a role Hudson was born to play, for what was “Dream Girls” but a soul era/Aretha arc tale roman a clef.

That’s French, not Latin.

“Respect,” due out on Aug. 14 (currently filming) has potential. The director, Liesly Tommy, is best known for “Jessica Jones” and “Dolly Parton’s Heartstrings” (Ok and “Meh.”). Oscar winner Forest Whitaker also stars.

(UPDATE: Roger Moore’s review of “Respect,” opening Aug 13 — two years after this trailer was first posted — is here).

One of three trailers that ran before “Cats,” that looked worse than “Cats.” A January release…or escape

Let others quibble about the fact that the meetings, debates and jokes exchanged in “The Two Popes” never actually happened. It’s a movie based on a play, a sort of papal “wish fulfillment fantasy” of the “If it didn’t happen like this, it should have,” variety, like “A Walk in the Woods,” “Elvis & Nixon” or “The West Wing.”

Fernando Meirelles (“City of God,” “The Constant Gardener”) is one of the greatest directors to come out of South America. Anthony Hopkins and Jonathan Pryce are glorious actors, and uncanny look-alikes for Pope Benedict and Pope Francis. Let’s see what they come up with.

Meirelles tests us right away with a couple of clumsily unfortunate choices. He dubs Pryce’s Spanish dialogue scenes, replacing his Spanish with a native speaker of the language who sounds little like him. An opening voice-over monologue of the pre-papal career of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the Argentine who became Pope Francis, is pointlessly if not wholly inexplicably also in Spanish.

Throwing all those subtitles, all that obvious fakery at us, right from the start, is a good way to make a lot of people tune out your papal “buddy comedy.”

But then the film finds its tone, the humble “man of the people” Pope (Pryce) sits in his Vatican bedroom, trying to get an English speaking Italian travel agent to book a flight home for him. She gets his name, remarks “Like the Pope?” She gets his address — “Vatican City.” “Nice TRY” she says, hanging up.

If only she’d waited to hear what credit card number he had at the ready.

“The Two Popes” is about the contrasting styles and testy relationship between Pope John Paul II’s close confidante and chosen successor, the conservative Pope Benedict XVI, and a rival Benedict dismissed when he ascended to the papacy, but had to turn to when the Catholic Church’s global priest child-molesting scandal blew up on his watch.

The idea is to contrast “God’s Rottweiler,” the Hitler Youth alumnus John Ratzinger (Benedict) with “The People’s Pope,” the simple champion of the poor and first pope from the Southern Hemisphere, Bergoglio (Francis).

It’s a humorless German vs. the folksy, joke-telling Argentine, a rigid adherent to pomp and circumstance forced to deal with a man ostentatiously un-ostentatious.

And it works. If you don’t think the Oscar-winning legend Hopkins can curt and dismissive, with imperious if not Nazi strong-man tendencies, you’ve not seen him in his evil prime. And his fellow Welshman Pryce has twinkled in many a supporting role over his decades in the cinema, just the right quality for Francis.

Meirelles treats us to that papal pomp, the Vatican City Papal Conclave of Cardinals where Archbishop Ratzinger politics and preens like the heir apparent he is, even though he fails to win on the first ballot. Other names have been put forward. Southern Hemisphere bishops are supporting Bergoglio.

Bergoglio paraphrases Plato, that the best qualification for “any leader is not WANTING to be leader.” Ratzinger, the future Benedict, CRAVES the papacy.

Benedict eventually wins the day, but this Argentine he looked down his nose at is very much on his mind when, years later, the scandal explodes, the Church’s decades of cover-up are exposed and “reform” is what the desperately ill institution desperately needs.

Benedict resents criticism, dogmatically insists on the raiments of office, adherence to ritual and circling the wagons against the assaults from “outside” the Church. Bergoglio recognized all along that “Our churches are beautiful, but empty,” and notes the Church is “not of this world” and out of touch.

One way the film opens up from these sometimes tetchy stage-bound arguments, mostly at the Pope’s country villa, is to take us back to Bergoglio’s Argentine past. Flashbacks, the earliest ones in black and white, capture his younger years, his plans for marriage and a business career, his love of tangoing with his intended (Cristina Banegas).

Juan Minujín plays the future Francis in these scenes, the best of which is the night he stepped into his local church, is urged into confession by the priest on duty and hears “the sign” that he has been waiting for, calling him to the priesthood. This scene, a dying priest convincing a young man that the fate that brought them together on this night was ordained by God, is profoundly moving.

Other flashbacks crash into Argentina’s troubled history, the murderous dictatorship that a guilt-ridden Bergoglio knows he didn’t challenge as openly as he might have.

But the heart of “The Two Popes” is these two popes bickering over dogma, traditions, the real evils in the world (“Banks,” says Bergoglio/Francis. “They devour everything.”) and priestly celibacy.

“San Pietro (Saint Peter, the Church’s founder) was MARRIED!” Bergoglio reminds the boss, ticking off other arcane traditions adopted, not ordained by the Bible, that fly in the face of modern life.

“I don’t agree with anything you say!” Benedict barks back.

The script tries entirely too hard to be cute, at times — papal rivals can be soccer rivals, too. But the leading men spar and tease and bond and bicker to great effect. Even the sour Benedict knows an ironic joke when he recites it.

“God always corrects one pope by sending another.”

It’s not “By the (Good) Book,” and it’s not real history. The whole scandal that brought Benedict down is inexcusably downplayed, the triumphalist closing credits ignore how the public’s infatuation with Francis has faded as his reforms haven’t reformed quickly and the scandal will not die.

These reasons, and some of the clumsy affections of the production, take this out of “awards season” contention, in my view.

But “The Two Popes” is still a revealing, intimate and interesting peek behind the fresco-bedecked walls of an institution trapped in a past of its own invention, confronting a future in which it still relies on a succession of very old men to meet.

Cast: Anthony Hopkins, Jonathan Pryce, Juan Minujín

Credits: Directed by Fernando Meirelles, script by Anthony McCarten, based on his play. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:05